On Language; Vetter Vets 'Vet'

By William Safire

Published: March 28, 1993

As a practicing veterinarian many years ago," writes Douglas F. McBride of Washingtonville, N.Y., "I was occasionally called to vet a horse. I was accustomed to being called by the noun vet , but the use of the word as a verb to describe what I was doing was infrequent."

Hoo-boy, have times changed. Now the verb to vet means "to search for weaknesses or flaws"; the noun vet continues to mean "animal doctor," but the noun for the person who does the vetting preparatory to clearance of a nominee for public office or candidate for any job is a vetter .

Judge Kimba M. Wood, whose sentence to Attorney Generalship was reduced to 24 hours, wrote: "Some of my household-help files were received by the White House 'vetters' at approximately 10 A.M." Use of the word in its gerund form was featured in a New York Times editorial that claimed Judge Wood's chances were destroyed by "clumsy vetting ."

My questioner wants to know if the new sense is applied only to documents, like household files, or to people as well; he cites my own usage in regard to a judicial panel's choice of a potential Iraqgate special prosecutor: "We can hope it has a choice already vetted ." Can you vet a choice who is a person?

Of course you can; if a vet can vet a horse, Dr. McBride, vetters can vet nominees. What we have here is a fine example of what English teachers who coach football teams call "functional shift": a noun becomes a verb and in this case develops a new sense right after the snap. When a doctor scopes a patient or a nervous executive lawyers a document -- even when a vet curbs a dog -- the subject takes a noun and shifts its function to that of a verb.

To vet the verb vet : it began with the Latin veter inus , "of cattle and similar domestic animals." ( Vet as a clipping of veteran is based on the Latin vetus , "old.") The first sense was the one most familiar to Dr. McBride, "to submit an animal to treatment or examination by a veterinarian." The meaning was extended at the turn of this century to "to examine closely," as in this 1904 use by Rudyard Kipling, who kept a horsy metaphor: "These are our crowd . . . . They've been vetted , an' we're putting 'em through their paces."

According to Anne Soukhanov at American Heritage, "The military use of the verb after Kipling was the key to the word's (at least the verb's) gain in international currency outside the British Isles." The dictionary she edits labels it "informal," not "chiefly British"; thanks to the latest burst of usage, lexies will have to start thinking of the word as Standard English.

How is political vetting done? The classic statement of the vetter to the vettee was put by Frank Mankiewicz of the McGovern campaign to a potential running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, in 1972: "Tom, is there anything in your background that can give us trouble? Any teen-age larks? . . . Anything at all that could raise some questions?"

When the general vetting question was put to Judge Wood by Clinton vetters, it was in the nature of "Do you have a problem with illegal household help?" Because the vettee saw no legal error, the vetters thought that meant no political problem.

The noun is spelled -er on the analogy of go-getter , not -or on the analogy of bettor , because the latter is spelled that way to avoid confusion with the comparative better . We may expect further extension beyond documents and persons: a quality-control officer for Hanes hosiery may be an underwear-vetter , and a German-accented inspector of beds -- oh, no. PINCHBECK

In an editorial encomium to the late actress Lillian Gish, The New York Times recalled one of her less memorable roles and commented, "The movie is pinchbeck ; Gish's evocation of horror, pure gold."

That was the eponym of the month. Eponyms, as fans of Amelia Bloomer and Captain Boycott know, are words based on names. Christopher Pinchbeck, a London watchmaker, invented an alloy -- five parts copper, one part zinc -- that looked somewhat like gold, and was used in making cheap jewelry.

In 1734, two years after Pinchbeck died, the novelist Henry Fielding helped preserve his name in the comedic play "The Intriguing Chambermaid": a character selling genuine gold watches is said to have complained "that the nobility and gentry run so much into Pinchbeck , that he had not dispos'd of two gold watches this month." By 1859, William Makepeace Thackeray, in his novel "The Virginians," was using the term in derision: "Those golden locks were only pinchbeck ."

The meaning: "sham, bogus, counterfeit, ersatz." A word worthy of resuscitation. SUCKING UP

"TRANSITION TIME IS A very sensitive moment for pundits," I wrote recently. "You cannot appear eager to make contact, lest you be accused of sucking up , but neither should you. . . ."

A number of readers ("a number of" can mean "two," which is a number) winced at this inelegant locution. "Is this today's street vernacular," asked S. Serebnick of Freehold, N.J., "which means 'apple-polishing'?"

This is not the first yecch! response to a modern application of the verb; in a piece on high-school slang, I reported the frequent use of to suck face , meaning "to kiss wetly and noisily." Lotsa shudders from people who forgot what bliss it was when young to oscillate while osculating.

Yes, S. Serebnick, to suck up and its predecessor to suck up to [ someone ] does mean "to flatter, curry favor with, obsequiously ingratiate," or as John Hotten defined the term in his 1860 dictionary, "to insinuate oneself into his good graces."

The noun sucker , in its slang sense of "thing," is in vogue use. Karen De Witt, a New York Times reporter covering the cultural revolution going on in Washington, wrote of a nightspot called Chief Ike's: "Any Saturday night will find 30 to 40 Clinton staff members lined up outside, waiting to hear Stella Neptune, the plastic-clad, gold-brassiered disk jockey, spin disco funk tunes like Parliament-Funkadelic's 'Tear the Roof Off the Sucker .' "

Now let's get to what's troubling us: are suck up and the related sucker euphemisms for, or based upon, a term heard only in R-rated movies?

Lexicographers believe that the origin of this usage is more innocent than one might think. They point to suck up 's possible back-formation from sucker . A citation from "The Chronicle of the Reign of Henry VI," written early in the 16th century, reads: "Flatterers to the kyng . . . suckers of his purse and robbers of his subjectes."

For most of the life of the language, then, sucker has meant "toady"; the parasitic sense is most clearly expressed in the current to suck up . I would not look shyly away at the use of the term, and readers should note that it hasn't been easy to deal with this sucker.